NewsGator Customer, Edelman, Featured in Microsoft Case Study

One of NewsGator's customers, PR agency Edelman, was just featured in a Microsoft case study that explains how they have recently transitioned over from their outdated ASP-based intranet to a much more robust intranet that they call Infusion, which is run off of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and NewsGator Social Sites. 

The Microsoft case study shows that Edelman's "old intranet" was becoming seriously outdated: the start page was the same for every employee (i.e., there was no customization); there was no content aggregation; limited search capabilities; cumbersome sharing of documents and search for people within the community; no real collaboration tools; and IT intervention was needed every step of the way from creation of the intranet through administration of it.

However, by implementing SharePoint, Edelman gained a range of new features and functionality.  This new platform includes: detailed people search and advanced search functionality; document versioning and management; heavy RSS integration, including external feeds; email alert integration; virtual project groups (with no need for IT management); social groups; personalized home pages specific to the person who logs in; and detailed profile pages.

Edelman also wanted to add even further social networking functionality, so they used NewsGator's expertise to implement the following Social Sites webparts: RSS content aggregation integrated directly into SharePoint; bringing SharePoint feeds out via subscription; site reading lists; and many social features including, among others:

• individual status updates
• talent management
• groups
• mini social profiles
• activity streams (both internal & external)

Incidentally, NewsGator recently hosted a joint webinar with Edelman and Microsoft -- "Delivering Web 2.0 Business Value with SharePoint -- and you can access that webinar here to learn more about how Edelman leveraged both Microsoft SharePoint and NewsGator Social Sites to create their new intranet.

In addition, you can access the full Microsoft case study here.

Two NewsGator Employees Once Again Named Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP)

For the third consecutive year, NewsGator has two employees who have been named Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs). This is the third year in a row that Glenn Berry, NewsGator's Database Architect, has been named a Microsoft MVP, and the fourth year in a row that Dan Larson, a Developer here, are in the ranks of those awarded that exclusive title.

The Microsoft MVP Award is an annual award that recognizes exceptional technology community leaders worldwide who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with users and Microsoft.  With fewer than 5,000 awardees worldwide, Microsoft MVP's represent a highly select group of experts.

To recognize the contributions they make, MVP's from around the world have the opportunity to meet Microsoft executives, network with peers, and position themselves as technical community leaders -- accomplished through speaking engagements and one on one customer event participation and technical content development.

In addition, Database Architect, Glenn Berry, is presenting two sessions at SQLPASS 2009 in Seattle, which is a pretty big deal in the SQL Server world.  Also, Dan Larson is the author of two books, Developing Service-Oriented AJAX Applications on the Microsoft Platform and Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

So, congratulations to NewsGator's Glenn Berry and Dan Larson. 

Webinar: Enterprise Social Computing - How to Leverage Your Exisiting SharePoint Technology

Please join NewsGator's Vice President of Marketing, Laura Farrelly, along with Mike Gilronan from KMA and Industry Analyst, Gil Yehuda, for a KMA-sponsored webinar, "Enterprise Social Computing -- How to Leverage Your Existing SharePoint Technology" from 12:30-1:30pm ET on Wednesday, August 26.

This webinar will focus on three broad topic areas:

• What is Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, or Social Media?
• Leveraging your SharePoint investment
• Taking SharePoint and Social Computing to the next level

NewsGator's Laura Farrelly will focus primarily on this last topic, which will go over how organizations are finding ways to take SharePoint and enterprise social computing to the next level by using tools like specific-purpose communities, content rating, tagging, and social network maps; she'll also highlight how NewsGator helps organizations build on SharePoint's capabilities.

In this webinar, you'll learn:

• How to decipher the terminology around Social Media and Enterprise 2.0
• 5 ways SharePoint users are using enterprise social computing today, using out-of-the-box capabilities
• 5 ways to amplify the value of your SharePoint enterprise social computing experience using NewsGator's Social Sites.

Register for this August 26 webinar here today!

Webinar: Boost Social Computing Adoption on SharePoint – Battelle Customer Story

A little over a year ago the questions around enterprise social computing, were focused on understanding what it entails and how to prove the business value. Fast forward a year and the questions now center around: how do we make it work, how do we get people to use it and what are best practices?

NewsGator has a wealth of experience and lessons learned around enterprise social computing deployment, adoption and best practices. However we thought you would like to hear from one of our customers! Battelle, a $5.2B research and development company that uses SharePoint and NewsGator Social Sites as their social computing platform, will share their story, experience and best practices around communities . In addition to Battelle’s story, J.B Holston (NewsGator CEO & President) will discuss his thoughts and insight on the importance of adoption.

We invite you to join Tom Monroe, Manager, Knowledge Management, from Battelle and J.B. Holston, on August 27, 2009 at 2pm ET for a live webinar focused on enterprise social computing community success and best practices for adoption.

Webinar topics will include:

• The importance of social computing adoption
• Deployment and adoption best practices for internal communities
• Battelle case study
• Question & answer session

Click here to register for the webinar today.

Inc. 500 Fastest-Growing Companies Award

Some good news we’re happy to share with you: Inc. magazine has named NewsGator one of the 500 fastest-growing companies in the country.

While not a complete surprise, it’s certainly an honor, and an affirmation of our rapid growth and success in enterprise social computing. Add this new proof point to our crossing of the million-user milestone with our NewsGator Social Sites enterprise social computing solution and our expanding relationship with Microsoft, and there’s no question: Social Sites is indispensable for organizations determined to find cost-effective ways to improve their business performance. As more than a million of you know, NewsGator Social Sites harnesses the power of social computing to improve innovation, sales, collaboration, recruitment, retention, expertise discovery and more.

The Inc. 500 award complements other honors for NewsGator announced in 2009, including: the Microsoft 2009 Best Social Computing Solution, KMWorld 2009 Companies That Matter, 2009 Colorado Companies to Watch, and the Upshot50 2009 Marketing Technology Leader.

We’re grateful. Honors are cool. But bottom-line results for our customers are what inspire us to keep getting better.

NewsGator Social Sites Profiled on TheAppGap.com

Over at TheAppGap.com (which bills itself as "Work 2.0 - News, views, and reviews,") Bill Ives has profiled NewsGator in an article, "NewsGator Offers Social Sites: A Comprehensive Enterprise Social Networking Suite." 

In the piece he explains how NewsGator's "customizable Social Networking Framework enhances the SharePoint "My Site" experience and provides a number of Facebook-like features behind the firewall."  He then goes on to point out some of the features of Social Sites he found of note.  For instance, he mentions Social Sites':

• auto-generated activity stream
• aggregated tag clouds
• relevant/popular content & active users

Bill discusses how Communities, within Social Sites, "are a core concept and feature" and that they're "very easy to start."  He mentions that multiple tabs indicate some of the functionality: discussion, feeds, bookmarks, members, documents, wiki, blog, and ideas.

He also explains how our new Innovation Management capability "enables employees to create campaigns, submit ideas, comment on ideas, vote for ideas, and manage a basic innovation life-cycle."  And, he rightly notes that "the system provides dynamic content discovery through public and private tags, search, and recommended content." 

Finally, he opines that "NewsGator has made the technology simple but feature set rich," which "opens up a wide range of decisions about how best to deploy the tools and how they impact business processes." 

Thanks for the coverage, Bill.  You can read his entire write-up here.